WINDMILL COUNTRY: Wheat OK despite Concho Valley chill

SAN ANGELO, Texas - Winter wheat in parts of Texas sustained freeze damage from temperatures dipping into the teens and low 20s this week. However, most of the Concho Valley wheat crop appears to have escaped major damage.

"Our wheat was not far enough along," said Rick Minzenmayer, a Ballinger entomologist. "Some of the wheat has the flag leaf exposed and the wheat about ready to go into boot, but the plant was not at the critical level yet."

The boot stage occurs shortly after flag leaf emergence and indicates the head is about to emerge.

On a drive to Ballinger on Tuesday, I noted some good-looking wheat around Rowena.

Most wheat in Runnels County is produced on dryland farms, which depend solely on rainfall, mainly in the Winters and Wingate areas, about 50 miles northeast of San Angelo.

Minzenmayer said some of the corn crop around Veribest got burned from the chilly weather, but it should recover.

"It will be set back and look bad for a while but should grow out OK," he said.

Tom Green County's cornfields are concentrated around Veribest, 12 miles east of San Angelo. Other farms growing corn stretch south to Wall and east to Eola in Concho County.

"There were some low spots where temperatures dropped to 24 and 25 degrees around Melvin," David Holubec said. "It will be about 10 days before we will know for sure if the wheat was damaged."

Holubec, who operates farm and ranch acreage two miles south of Melvin in McCulloch County, said the wheat in the area is not as advanced as in Northeast Texas, where major damage is being reported.

"The wheat in some low areas may have received freeze damage," Holubec said. "At midweek my thermometer had 33 degrees and my son, who lives a mile away down in the low area next to a creek, had 24 degrees. Our wheat is not headed and is still in the boot."

The majority of McCulloch County's wheat is grown in the western edge of the county around Melvin, about 60 miles southeast of San Angelo. The Salt Gap area north of Melvin and on the Concho-McCulloch county line has the greatest concentration of wheat acreage.

"Temperatures in the teens and low 20s appear to have been common in the Panhandle, and in the upper 20s and low 30s in the Blacklands on Sunday night and Monday morning," said Dr. Travis Miller, agronomist at Texas A&M University at College Station. "These temperatures are sufficiently cold to cause severe injury to wheat in advanced stages of growth."

A hard freeze can kill individual developing seed heads, he said. Throughout the state, wheat was in various growth stages and each plant has multiple tillers of different ages.

Wheat with heads in an early stage of development can tolerate temperatures as low as 20 degrees for a few hours without much damage, but wheat in bloom can suffer significant injury from 32-degree temperatures, Miller said.

"Freeze damage is always worse in low spots in fields," he said. "It might kill the older heads and not the younger heads. It's a real mixed bag out there, a real hodgepodge."

Miller said it was a mixed blessing that much of the wheat in the eastern part of the state suffered from drought conditions in the fall and did not emerge until January.

"I don't expect that late-emerging wheat will be far enough advanced to be injured, but this late wheat has a lower yield potential than wheat that germinated in the fall. When it emerges late, it has lower potential yields due to fewer tillers and a greater risk of exposure to heat during critical growth stages," he said.

According to the weekly crop and weather report issued by Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, Miller predicted a below-average wheat crop for the Texas South Plains, Panhandle and Rolling Plains because of a dry fall and problems with emergence.

That was a month ago, when Blacklands wheat — from the Metroplex north and east — looked good, being in better shape than anywhere else in the state.

"Now that wheat is at risk, too, because of the freezes," Miller said.

Jerry Lackey writes about agriculture. Contact him at jlackey@wcc.net or 325-949-2291.